Wrestling with pragmatism on Chris Bryant’s stream

Sunday morning, I joined Chris Bryant’s popular Youtube stream for a wide-ranging discussion on many of my hardest lessons from 10 years in animal advocacy.

This was a full-circle moment for me. When I started Pax Fauna without any research experience to speak of, Chris gave me some helpful advice. I was tickled to hear that my writing has helped him think about AI and even inspired him to drop thousands of dollars on Claude Max plans for his team.

Last week, I argued that if not for transformative AI, the outlook for animal rights would be terribly bleak: on our current trajectory, I’d expect factory farming to be more widespread in 2100 than now. I don’t actually think that world is likely, because I do expect AI to be maximally transformative. Yet it has still been weighing on my mind, especially the part of my mind that still doesn’t quite believe all this AI stuff.

It took me many years to outgrow ways of thinking about activism that led me towards comfortable beliefs rather than true ones. For me, it was important lessons. For animals, it was incomprehensible cycles of pain and death.

That mood came through very clearly with Chris. I hope you find the conversation useful, and not too discouraging:

Build on, Sandcastles